Saving Sergeant Bergdahl: Unanswered Questions

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, President Obama defended his decision to swap five aging Taliban prisoners, who were being held at Guantanamo Bay, for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, saying, “I think it was important for people to understand that this is not some abstraction, this is not some political football. You have a couple of parents whose kid volunteered to fight in a distant land, who they hadn’t seen in five years, and weren’t sure whether they’d ever see again.… I make absolutely no apologies for making sure that we get back a young man to his parents, and that the American people understand that this is somebody’s child, and that we don’t condition whether or not we make the effort to try and get them back.”

It was a forceful statement. But if the White House is hoping it will calm the controversy in Washington over the prisoner exchange, it will surely be disappointed. Obama’s Republican critics are still piling on, and the Democrats, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Senator Harry Reid, are keeping quiet or registering some doubts of their own. After a classified briefing for senators and congressmen on Wednesday evening at the Capitol, Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, left visibly angry, according to a report in the Times, and said, “I think we can all agree we’re not dealing with a war hero here.”

Actually, Bergdahl’s heroism, or lack thereof, is one of the many things about this story that still needs to be pinned down. Question marks also hang over the negotiations that led to his release; the extent, if any, to which the White House violated its obligation to keep Congress informed about a possible release of prisoners from Guantanamo; and the role, if any, that political considerations played in the timing of the deal. (It did seem rather convenient that Bergdahl was released at the end of a week in which President Obama had made a surprise Memorial Day visit to Afghanistan and announced the withdrawal of all American troops from the country by the end of 2016.)

The immediate focus, however, is on Bergdahl, whose reputation has been so battered that his hometown of Hailey, Idaho, has cancelled a homecoming celebration, citing security concerns. Yet nobody contests that Bergdahl, at least until he disappeared, was a front-line soldier who put his life on the line in Paktika province, which runs along the border with Pakistan—or that he has spent five years being held captive by the Taliban, an ordeal about which we know virtually nothing.

If he had been captured on the battlefield and held captive in Waziristan for fifty-nine months, Sean Hannity and John McCain wouldn’t be getting upset about the military dangers of releasing five aging Taliban commanders, who have been in Gitmo for more than a decade. They’d be welcoming a U.S. soldier’s release, which a number of Republicans did on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the announcement about the prisoner exchange. (They have since deleted their tweets.) As Senator Reid pointed out on the Senate floor on Wednesday, some of the White House’s critics have been calling on Obama for years to do all he could to secure Bergdahl’s release.

What transformed the politics of this story, of course, were allegations from some of Bergdahl’s comrades that on June 30, 2009, he walked off his military encampment in the middle of the night, sending home his computer, books, and other personal effects before he left. “Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down,” Nathan Bethea, a former soldier who says he served in Bergdahl’s unit, wrote in the Daily Beast on Monday.

The other members of the platoon who have labeled Bergdahl a deserter, even if some of their media interviews were arranged by Republican operatives, are surely saying what they believe to be the truth. From the perspective of soldiers who have seen friends and comrades killed in action, this anger is understandable. But some of it may be ill-directed. The eight soldiers who lost their lives in Paktika province in the weeks and months after weren’t directly involved in the search for Bergdahl: it was a dangerous place for American soldiers long before he disappeared. After reviewing casualty reports and military logs and interviewing senior military officials, the Times’s Charlie Savage and Andrew W. Lehren concluded that “the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive.”

In any case, only Bergdahl can explain what happened to him on that night, and what his motivations were if he did walk off the base. Thanks to a long and stellar 2012 article in Rolling Stone by Michael Hastings, “America’s Last Prisoner of War,” we already know that Bergdahl had become increasingly disillusioned with the conduct of the war, but also that he was no Bradley Manning, a mismatch for the Army from the get-go. [Update: I should have noted that she is now known as Chelsea Manning.] To the contrary, Bergdahl appears to have viewed himself as a would-be military adventurer.

A macho kid who shot air rifles and rode horses at the age of five, he applied to join the French Foreign Legion at the age of twenty and, after he was turned down, he became besotted with the show “Man vs. Wild,” which features Bear Grylls, an English adventurer, military veteran, and television presenter. “He is Bear Grylls in his own mind,” Bergdahl’s father told Hastings. After joining the 25th Infantry Division in 2008 and being assigned for duty in Afghanistan, he learned Pashto, studied U.S. military manuals, and worked out constantly. In a blog post written during the platoon’s training exercises, one of his fellow soldiers referred to him as “Mr. Intensity.”

When Bergdahl reached Afghanistan, in March, 2009, things didn’t go well. His platoon was undisciplined; the lieutenant in charge was removed from his post; one of Bergdahl’s friends from training camp was killed by a roadside bomb. Bergdahl became embittered. In his final e-mail to his parents, on June 27th, he railed at the incompetence of his superiors, writing, “In the US army you are cut down for being honest … but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit bag you will be allowed to do what ever you want, and you will be handed your higher rank.… The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an american. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools.”

Bergdahl also complained about the U.S. Army’s treatment of Afghan civilians, saying, “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks.… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.” In signing off, he said, “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is america is disgusting.” And, he added, “There are a few more boxes coming to you guys. Feel free to open them, and use them.”

Does this e-mail prove that Bergdahl was a deserter or even, as some right-wing commentators are suggesting, a traitor who aided and abetted the Taliban? No, it doesn’t. If anything, he sounds more like Captain Yossarian, the antic antihero of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”—who considers his superiors to be nuts and eventually goes AWOL—than Sergeant Brody, the double-dealing protagonist of “Homeland.” In his early twenties, engaged in a war on the other side of the world that many people, including his Commander-in-Chief, would ultimately decide was counterproductive, Bergdahl, seemingly, had had enough.

And that, for now, is about all we know. “As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts,” General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty.”